


Rotting Lazarus

by WhyWhyNot



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Character Death, Gen, Gore, He's not there but he is a d i c k, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Stick is a dick, Zombies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-14
Updated: 2020-01-21
Packaged: 2020-03-05 11:09:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 1,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18827470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhyWhyNot/pseuds/WhyWhyNot
Summary: Matt is adopted by his aunt a few months after Stick left, and leaves New York to live with her.Because his luck is shit, the town is taken over by zombies.





	1. Chapter 1

The smell of rot is overwhelming. 

No.

The smell of _rotting flesh_ is overwhelming. 

Matt feels _sick_ , and the stench is so strong he can _taste_ it, in his nose and mouth and _down his thoat_ and he's going to _throw up_ , and the moving car is _not helping_.

( _Pussy_ says Stick in his head, _too weak, useless, can't even breathe. And you're surprised I left?_ )

Matt tries to breath through his mouth. It's barely better.   
"Kay, what's going on?  
\- Nothing, Matty, don't worry."

 _Lie_. Matt wouldn't have believed her even without the tell-tale jump of her heartbeat. 

(It was hard to hear. Her heart is going fast, and Matt thinks she's _scared_ , why is she _scared_?)

"Shit!"

Ashes. Burnt rubber. Hot metal. _Burning car_. The car stop, and when Kay drags him out of the car, and Matt properly takes in the size of the obstacle. 

Burning _bus_. Burning flesh, too.

"Kay, there are people inside!  
\- ...It's alright, Matty. Everything is going to be _just fine_ , but I you need to do _exactly_ what I say, okay?   
\- Why?   
\- To keep you safe, it's important. Okay?"

She's not lying. And Matt still can't figure what's _going on_.

"Okay."

\---

People are grunting. 

Well. Matt _thinks_ people are grunting. It's... There are noises, strange noises, and they're not fully _human_ , and not _animal_ , and he can hear distorted footsteps, like the whole town is dragging their feet, but no voice and no heartbeats. 

No voice. No heartbeats. Shuffling feet, the smell of rotting flesh. It's as if the city died, and its inhabitants kept walking. 

(That's stupid. He should focus, find out what's happening, why Kay is trying so hard to be silent, why her heart is hammering so hard.)

\---

Two Silent Walkers corner them in a back alley, and Kay tells Matt to stay behind her.

(Normally, he wouldn't have listened. But he's still unsure of the situation, and Kay has a knife.)

She aims for the head, and they _don't have a heartbeat_ , and they keep standing after she cut their throats. 

"Are they zombies?"

Matt winces at his blurts, but the skip in her heartbeat answers him before she can.

"Yes. They're zombies."

Well. That explains why they need to leave town.


	2. Chapter 2

“I think a crow bar would be more efficient.”

Kay turns her face in Matt’s direction.

“What?  
\- A crow bar. It’s hard to destroy the brain with a knife. It should be easier to crush the skull with something easy and contendant. Like a crow bar.”

Matt isn’t wrong. She doesn’t have a crow bar, but…

Here. A metal bar in the wreckage, where a car out of control hit a fire escape. The driver is still in his vehicle, and he snaps his jaws at her when she passes, but his security belt ties him solidly to his seat, and she doesn’t waste time on him.

She gives the knife to Matt. Better than nothing.

She thinks she hears him grumble something about someone leaving before getting to the knives, and she resolves to have a talk with him when they get out of this hellhole.

\---

They are swarmed.

 _Swarmed_.

(Two, three, five, eight, twelve, twenty, and all she has is a metal bar and a blind kid with a knife.)

“Matt, you’re going to climb on my shoulders and reach the fire escape to get the ladder down. Do you understand?”

Matt nods, and uses the wall to straigh up backflip up the fire escape.

They _really_ need to talk about it, but it will have to wait until they’re out.

And then Kay has to swing her metal bar in the head of a dead woman wearing a bright yellow dress, and she is distracted.

Matt gets the ladder down and she turns to climb, but a sudden pain in her ankle stops.

A toddler. A tiny, bloody, _dead_ toddler crawled up to her unseen, and bit her.

She kicks her (IT! It’s dead, this thing is dead, it’s not a child anymore) away, but another zombie grabs her arm, and while she tries to push it away another grips her shoulder and she feels teeth in her throat.

“Run!” is the last think she manages to say before things go black

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's not fridging I swear


	3. Chapter 3

Crouching on the fire escape, Matt can hear Kay die.

(The dead are chewing on her flesh, and the sounds of mastication are almost unbearable.)

There’s nothing he can do there. He needs to _get moving_.

( _“Run!”_ )

Kay would have wanted him to survive.

\---

Matt uses the fire escape to get on the roof.

(The streets are full of dead. It’s safer to avoid them. And he doesn’t have to stay with Kay anymore.)

The first jump is easy. The second, over a larger street, is harder. The third is impossible, and he has to use a cable between two streetlights to get across, knife strapped in his belt.

(Check for the moans and footsteps of the dead, find the best way to the next roof, hope it’s the right direction and _jump_.)

He focus on the almost mechanical repetition, on making sure there isn’t any _thing_ in his way, on choosing the safest path, on never missing a step, to keep at bay the echoes of Stick’s mocking and condescending voice and, of teeth _chewing_ his aunt’s flesh.

(A part of him relishes in the thrill of the jump, in the freedom of the fall, in the control he has on his own body, and he hates it, he hates that he can find happiness in this nightmare.)

(He crouched on a fire escape as Kay died and did nothing.)


	4. Chapter 4

Kaytlin wakes up.

That is, all things considered, a somewhat unexpected event.

Kaytlin wakes up. At first, everything seems alright and she thinks she just had a bad dream. She doesn’t feel cold, or hurt. She’s lying in her bed, in her home, and all is well.

Then, she opens her eyes and sees the sky over her.

(The sky is a bright, uniform blue. It’s a very beautiful summer day.)

She isn’t in her bed.

And when she raises her head, a zombie is kneeling over her and chewing on her bowels.

(There’s another one tearing strips of flesh from her left arm, but she barely notices it.)

Her insides are pouring out of her belly like long slimy ribbons and a zombie in eating them.

_A zombie is eating her insides, and she doesn’t feel anything._

Kay is, to her own surprise, perfectly calm when she uses her right hand to grab the crow bar and bashes in the skull of the moving corpse on her arm, and repeat the action on the one in her guts.

(A distant, almost clinical part of her wonders if she’s going into shock.)

She stands up, and looks at herself in a window. She’s pale, abnormally so, and there’s à _hole_ in the side of her neck.

(A zombie bit off her carotid, she remembers.)

(She… She think she bled out.)

She unconsciously takes a step and trips.

(Her bowels. She walked on her own bowels.)

(She chases the thought out of her head and picks up a piece of broken glass to cut the ribbons of flesh where they go out of her body. She doesn’t feel anything.)

She needs to find Matt. She left him alone in a town full of dead. 

She needs to get him out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> She lives!  
> Or, uh, she undies?


	5. Chapter 5

There’s a baby crying.

(There are dead people growling, growling and moaning as the dead now do, shuffling steps and cracking wood, the doors between the child and them slowly breaking one after another. There are a lot of dead people.)

There’s a baby crying.

( _Pussy_ , spits head-Stick, _weak, emotional, people die in a war, stop focusing on the fucking screams these people don’t matter, they’re just distractions_ …)

( _We must dissent from the indifference_ , whispers Thurgood Marshall. _We must dissent from the apathy._ )

Matt hesitates, and then he thinks of Dad, of how _disappointed_ he would be in him.

( _And do not forget to do good and to share with others_.)

Matt turns around and hopes he gets to the child before the dead do.


	6. Chapter 6

Kay’s problem is, she doesn’t know where Matty went.

She checked the fire escape all the way up to the roof, and methodically went through the building, without result. She called, again and again, in vain.

(She hopes Matty is okay. She hopes he’s careful, and as safe as one can be in this nightmare. She hopes he will be able to get out of town even if she can’t find him.)

She doesn’t know how to find him.

( _Shitshitshitshitshitshitshitshit_ …)

Deep breath. Calm. Method. Proceed step by step, like when she got rid of Randal.

North. They were heading north. If she’s lucky, Matty will have continued in this direction.

It’s not perfect, but it’s a start.

Kay starts to walk.

There are soldiers behind the corner.


	7. Chapter 7

There’s brain on Matt’s hands.

There’s brain on his hands.

Matt tightens his grip on his knife to stop them from shaking.

It’s no wonder the baby was crying. The metal bars of the bed were the only thing between him and the zombie.

(The zombie was shorter than Matt, and he _refuses_ to think about what it means.)

Matt wipes his hands on his pants. The baby is still crying.

He can hears the groans of the undead, stumbling toward the sound.

Matt isn’t good with babies. He doesn’t know how to sooth them, how to make them stop crying.

He needs to find a way to keep him silent, though. They can’t afford that kind of noise.

Matt runs his hand on the mattress until he finds the pacifier, and put it in the baby’s mouth.

(He’s a terrible, terrible person, but _he doesn’t know what else to do_.)

He tears a strip of the sheet and uses it to keep the pacifier in place like a gag.

(What else can he _do_? )

He tears the rest of the sheet, uses it to securely strap the baby to his back.

(They need to leave. _Now_.)

He climbs the fire escape to the roof. Runs to the edge. Jumps.

Misses.

**Author's Note:**

> Kay is short for Kaytlin, and is Jack's estranged sister. If anyone is interested Ihave a surprising amount of headcanons about her.


End file.
